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I see articles by intelligent ladies on how difficult they are finding it to catch an eligible, smart, intelligent husband. I don't see so many similar perspectives from males. Why so? Anyway, I will try to remedy that here. So the ladies say that the men that they are sought to paired with or matched with tend to be typically dumb, or money-minded, or career-focused, or culturally conservative (plain English --> the usual chauvinistic Indian male who will ONLY marry a virgin female and will have a heart attack at the idea of stuff such open marriage or letting his wife have extramarital affairs and be chill about that) or mama's boys. I agree with all those evaluations of course. But I am not like any of those.

So let me try to understand ... Mostly it seems folks are
'angry' with thatItalian
mafiarunning this country. Hmmmm ... (1)Is India like a family-owned corporation where ownership gets
passed from mom/dad to son/daughter? Like in an Ambani-run business or
Adani-run business? Or folks areangrywith some party variously calledKhangressorCONgresswhich has beenlootingthis country since 60 years. (2)Again, begs the question —> Has India been a dictatorship like
an Iraq or Egypt or Pakistan for all these years? The author asks for an
accounting of theachievementsof the government over the past 10
years. The achievements of the
government are not really separate from the achievements of the people. What
has been the story of each of our lives in the last 10 years. Let us do a
double-entry bookkeeping style debit and credit of our lives if we want and
that will make things clear. I can do that for myself
... as I sometimes do.…

From the book Updike: “Updike wasn’t the first in his
Ipswich crowd to commit adultery, and it’s possible that he wasn’t even the
first in his marriage… He didn’t have to look far to find a lover. Several of
the couples had already had affairs before moving to Ipswich, and once they
were all settled and best friends, romantic intrigue was very much in the air.
It’s safe to say that the group’s unusual closeness (and a large part of the
pain that followed) had something to do with the collective willingness to
indulge in extramarital sex. This “weave of promiscuous friendship” wasn’t a
purely local phenomenon. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise” is perhaps the
most famous line from [Updike's 1968 novel]Couples, which Updike set in 1963, three years after
he claimed to have first fallen “in love, away from marriage” — and three years
after the first birth-control pill was approved for use in the United States.
Did the advent of oral contracept…

Who says Indians are NOT dense? I
thought the evidence was pretty clear. Just look at the obsession with silly
religious rituals. Look at how sundry godmen are prospering. Look at how
'popular' Double Sri Bearded Widow is among the section of our population who
are supposed to be among the most educated. Look at the obsession with cricket and
Bollywood —> and the obsession, in turn, of those 'heroes' of people (Sachin
and Bachchan) with various gods. One donates crores to this and that god;
another sheds tears when charlatan Afro Sai Baba dies. Even the pointless 'heat' during the
present election season shows the silliness of Indians. The choices on offer are all so
mediocre that I am mostly happy to remain a bystander. But look at the
Modi-bhakts who are happy to abuse all and sundry at the slightest bit of
'questioning' of their 'leader.' They will abuse all and sundry —
whether it's Mahesh Murthy﻿ or a retired general or a retired Ambassad…

Sachi Mohanty

My favorite words at present: There are no lessons to be learnt, no
discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer. I find myself left with
nothing but a few random thoughts. One of them is that from up here I
can look back and see that although a human life is less than the blink
of an eyelid in terms of the universe, within its own framework it is
amazingly capacious so that it can contain many opposites. One life can
contain serenity and tumult, heartbreak and happiness, coldness and
warmth, grabbing and giving — and also more particular opposites such as
a neurotic conviction that one is a flop and a consciousness of success
amounting to smugness.

I think I am a born rebel or a subversive. I am definitely an atheist. I sometimes feel that in a country as suffocatingly religious as India, some of us have to go to the other extreme as a counterweight to all the religious blindness which is there.